KEY POINTS:
Anybody with the slightest knowledge of golf history knows St Andrews is regarded as the cradle of the game.
It was at the Old Course in the Auld Grey Toon on Scotland's Eden Estuary that the standard became 18 holes, where a tin cup was first inserted in a green as the place to hole out and where tee markers were introduced as the spot to start play.
Those facts are contained in the first significant literary and research work on the Old Course. The book St Andrews - the Evolution of the Old Course is by New Zealand golf architect Scott Macpherson, who lives in Edinburgh after six years at St Andrews from 1999.
He's been back in the country this past week looking at projects he and design partner Greg Turner are working on together in Central Otago and at the New Plymouth Golf Club. Macpherson is a rising star in the world of golf course design. Despite a degree in landscape architecture from the University of California and experience in America, his greatest affinity is with the links country of Scotland, hardly surprising given his lineage and upbringing and subsequent junior golf career at Paraparaumu Beach, still this country's finest links course.
He often played and caddied the Old Course when he was living in St Andrews, supervising the construction of two new resort courses. Macpherson wanted to know how much St Andrews had changed since it came into existence, possibly as far back as the 1400s.
No records exist about golf there until St Andrews' first Open Championship of 1873, so the book uses as its core thesis the evolution of the game, equipment and scoring through the 26 Open Championships at the Old Course. (The adjacent New Course opened in 1895.)
Despite the course always being in the same place, and the total area only a modest 38 hectares (most top modern golf courses cover at least 55ha), Macpherson found there's been almost constant tinkering since equipment began evolving with the gutta percha ball in 1848.
The course for the 1905 Open Championship was set up 200 yards longer than that for the 1900 event, to cope with the newly invented rubber-wound Haskell ball which could be hit significantly further than the old 'gutty.'
Nearly a century later, the 1995 Open Championship course was 6933 yards. In 2005, it was stretched to 7279 yards. In the intervening decade, Tiger Woods arrived and the solid-core four-piece ball had been invented. The course needed protection against its score-enhancing qualities of extra length and more spin. The changes made little difference because the field made more birdies in 2005 (1591) than it did in 1995 (1425).
This fascinating and scholarly work deserves its place among the best golf volumes of recent times. Macpherson is a colourful writer and this New Zealand publication should be short-listed for the non-fiction prize at the Montana Book awards.
